The Charles Dickens Letters Project

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Individual letter:

Dickens, Charles. To [addressee], [date of letter]. Charles Dickens Letters Project, ed. Leon Litvack, Emily Bell, Lydia Craig and Jeremy Parrott (London: Dickens Fellowship). [URL of individual letter], [date of access].

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Charles Dickens Letters Project, ed. Leon Litvack, Emily Bell, Lydia Craig and Jeremy Parrott (London: Dickens Fellowship), DickensLetters.com.

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Period:

1851-1860

Theme(s):

journalism

Great Expectations

To PETER BAYNE,1 21 NOVEMBER 1860

Text from facsimile in Bonham's online catalogue, June 2021.

Private

GAD'S HILL PLACE,
HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT.
Wednesday Twenty First November, 1860.

Dear Sir

I beg to assure you that your letter has interested me, and that I am truly sensible of the confidence and regard it expresses towards myself. I cannot read such words unmoved, and I feel them deeply.
But I cannot conscientiously accept the function you propose to me.2 At the present time I am fully occupied. It is a rule of mine to do nothing that I cannot reasonably hope to do at my best. For the next twelve months, I already see before me, undertaken, as much work as I can couple with the relaxation that is indispensable to its sound performance.3 The consciousness of a new responsibility, however slight its demands upon my time, would disturb me, and I must leave the discharge of this office to other hands.

Believe me Dear Sir

Faithfully Yours

CHARLES DICKENS

Peter Bayne Esquire.

1. Peter Bayne (1830-96; Dictionary of National Biography), Scottish journalist and author, who occasionally wrote under the pseudonym Ellis Brandt. Contributed to Hogg's Weekly Magazine and Tait's Edinburgh Magazine in the 1850s; briefly served as editor of The Glasgow Comonwealth, 1856. In 1860 he was appointed editor of The Dial, a weekly newspaper planned on an ambitious scale, published in London by the National Newspaper League Company; it was established, according to its first issue, to exercise "a just and vigilant censorship in the interest of the country" and to instruct "the great body of the people" morally and intellectually. The venture was unsuccessful: Bayne struggled heroically to save the situation by editorial ability, but lost all his own property in the venture, and burdened himself with debts that crippled him for many years. He retired from The Dial in 1862. For CD's comments on The Dial see To Thomas Beard, 14 Oct 1858, in Pilgrim Letters 8, p. 679.
2. Unidentified.
3. CD was writing Great Expectations, which began to appear in All the Year Round on 1 December 1860.